A focus group is a group of people assembled to discuss and provide feedback on a particular topic. Focus groups are useful for gathering attitudes, feelings, beliefs and reactions from respondents in a way that individual interviews or surveys cannot. They allow for a multiplicity of views to be shared and for more information to be obtained in a shorter period of time compared to other methods. Focus groups are particularly helpful when power differences exist between participants and decision-makers, or when exploring the language and culture of particular groups. While focus groups can help generate hypotheses and develop survey questions, the findings cannot be generalized to the whole population due to the small number of participants.

1. Focus Group

2. What is a focus group?
 A focus group can be defined as a group of
people assembled to participate in discussion
about a certain topic, or to provide feedback on
a televisions series eyc.

3. Examples of focus group.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POF3m6ZNoiY
 This is are examples of focus groups talking about different topic such camera phones, diet food
etc.
 So therefore focus group are used for different topics.

4. Why use focus group
 The main purpose of focus group research is to draw upon respondents’ attitudes, feelings, beliefs,
experiences and reactions in a way in which would not be feasible using other methods, for example
observation, one-to-one interviewing, or questionnaire surveys. These attitudes, feelings and beliefs may
be partially independent of a group or its social setting, but are more likely to be revealed via the social
gathering and the interaction which being in a focus group entails. Compared to individual interviews,
which aim to obtain individual attitudes, beliefs and feelings, focus groups elicit a multiplicity of views
and emotional processes within a group context. The individual interview is easier for the researcher to
control than a focus group in which participants may take the initiative. Compared to observation, a focus
group enables the researcher to gain a larger amount of information in a shorter period of time.
Observational methods tend to depend on waiting for things to happen, whereas the researcher follows
an interview guide in a focus group. In this sense focus groups are not natural but organised events.
Focus groups are particularly useful when there are power differences between the participants and
decision-makers or professionals, when the everyday use of language and culture of particular groups is
of interest, and when one wants to explore the degree of consensus on a given topic (Morgan & Kreuger
1993).

5. The role of focus group
 1994); or after a programme has been completed, to assess its impact or to generate further
avenues of research. They can be used either as a method in their own right or as a complement to
other methods, especially for triangulation (Morgan 1988) and validity checking.
 Focus groups can help to explore or generate hypotheses (Powell & Single 1996) and develop
questions or concepts for questionnaires and interview guides (Hoppe et al 1995; Lankshear 1993).
They are however limited in terms of their ability to generalise findings to a whole population,
mainly because of the small numbers of people participating and the likelihood that the
participants will not be a representative sample. Examples of research in which focus groups have
been employed include developing HIV education in Zimbabwe (Munodawafa et al 1995),
understanding how media messages are processed (Kitzinger 1994 & 1995), exploring people’s fear
of woodlands (Burgess 1996) and distance interviewing of family doctors (White & Thomson 1995).